Why Doesn't Everyone Read Comics?

And that's just on the production end. Recent years have seen a number of fumbles on the management/storyrunning end that have come from outright petty one-upsmanship and bizarre ego trips on the part of the people at the top.

One More Day retconned away all of Peter Parker's marriage to Mary Jane Watson, to enormous fan backlash, because the guy in charge of Marvel Comics at the time thought Spider-Man should never be happy. Nothing the writer on the title had to say about that mattered.

Dan DiDio's tenure over DC (especially the New 52 era) was marked by a personal vendetta against various legacy heroes and sidekicks (basically any character created after the Silver Age, regardless of their popularity or sales numbers). Kicking various characters to the curb that didn't fit into his personal pack of favorites.

At the height of the Fox/ Disney kerfuffle over film rights, Marvel comics was made kill off or otherwise remove or depower Mutants and the Fantasitc 4 to just to reduce the number of X-Men and Fantastic Four comic tiles in order to deny Fox any extra hype for their movie projects. A lesser example would be fiddling around with Squirrel Girl's background to pretend that she was never a Mutant.

So carrying on from Digi 's point about following umpteen comics to follow a single story, add to that slogging through all that just to see the tale end with the death or diminished of one of your favorite characters.

Another example of a movie having a blow back effect on comics sales: Ike Perlmutter. Before Kevin Feige assumed creative control of the entire MCU, Perlmutter ran the movies and had his fingers on the scales of which film projects would be added to the series. He blocked any efforts at a Black Panther movie or any movie headlined by a female super, and also diminished Black Widow's presence on or in Avengers movie merchandise, all from the belief that minority and female characters wouldn't push as much product. Thus denying those characters spotlights that could have driven new readers to their comic titles for YEARS.


But the problems are not all in-house. Comic books are suffering the same plague of toxic fandom that everything else is these days. Top of my head, I'm thinking of the vocal minority that threw fits over Marvel adding more women and people of color to their headliner series (Jane Foster Thor, Ironheart, etc). In our social media dominated pop culture landscape, the controversy they generate over every little precious thing does the job of driving some people away.

 Or about AUST$7.  comics was 1 of the first items to cop the full GST back in July 1 2000. Comics literally doubled in price overnight back then.. And as a comics reader/collector since the early 80's.. OUCH

1) Because, in the English-speaking world, comics are seen as being juvenile, produced for children, even when that's not been the case for something like thirty years. When Tim Burton's "Batman" came out in the cinemas, a lot of parents took their kids and came out furious that it wasn't anything like the 1960s tv series - a lot of people haven't learned this lesson. I can't remember *why* this is the case, I have a vague memory reading that there were efforts in the UK and US over stopping certain kinds of material being published, but in France this never happened so comics are read more widely).

2) Because, in the English-speaking world, comics are (paradoxically) read mainly by thirty-something and early-middle-aged men. Not a cool demographic.

3) Because Marvel UK went bust after over-reaching itself by direct selling into the US. That killed the domestic UK comics market. Back in the 1980s, you could spend your pocket money (and get change back, in fact) on a comic with two comic strips (one of which would more likely than not be an original and not a US reprint), a Lew Stringer humour strip, a text story, a letters page, a readers' art page, and some decent adverts. Nowadays - and I recommend tracking down the relevant article on the downthetubes website - UK comics are more expensive and contain much less original material. The ones I've seen resemble World Distributors DW annuals - all filler.

4) Because supermarkets play silly buggers (again, see downthetubes, but basically the supermarkets insist on something special to get a place on their shelves so the publishers still a crappy plastic toy on the cover, then the supermarkets complain the comics don't sit on the shelves properly)

5) Because (no3 notwithstanding) US comics are bloody expensive, and if you've been following the DC/Diamond debacle you'll know that the price of comics from all US publishers is going to go through the roof everywhere outside America, even Canada's not going to be immune.

6) Because superheroes only count if they're in the movies. When "Smallville" was first announced as coming to tv, one of the objections raised was that it couldn't possibly be set in the present day, it must be set in the 1970s; presumably on the basis that Superman is Christopher Reeve and Christopher Reeve is Superman and nothing else counts.

7) Because people are dumb. We can't even get DW fans to listen to FREE Big Finish - not just downloads, even on the radio - so why does any body expect them to lash out money? IF iT i noT ONB tV tHeN iT iS not cAnNoN.

8) Continuity has been suggested above, but I think that's only an obstacle to specific comics or characters, not comics as a whole.

I'd also suggest looking beyond Marvel & DC, its not all about the familiar superheroes. Image comics do some good stuff, as do Boom Studios.

I used to be a huge comics reader. I have schlepped 17 long boxes of comics from the 80s an d90s with me from Boston to New Jersey and from one house to another. I stopped when my oldest was born because I no longer had the disposable income or time to spend on them. I have wanted to get back into them, but the sheer cost of really getting into some titles and the amount of story that has gone on for the last 19 years is daunting. I do read a few every so often these days, but my regular buying and collecting is way behind me.

It’s interesting that Mr Mills talks about comics not being for kids any more when it was 2000AD that spearheaded that approach of writing above the age of the audience which eventually led to kids not reading them. Which - based on over 20 years of anecdotal observations - kids don’t do these days. Computer games have taken over as the dominant art form for what used to be the comic audience. Comics are, as noted by others here, ridiculously expensive and hard to follow. When I buy them these days, which isn’t often, it’s always a limited series, which I will then follow up with a trade collection. 

I do agree with Mills when he says the superhero POV has changed, but I’d argue also that the subtext has become the text with most stories in that the stories used to be about heroes defeating the villains with their inner life as a commentary: however, now the situation is often reversed. Comics are becoming a literary form rather than a genre 

I'd definitely recommend looking beyond all the super hero stuff, and go for some of the trade paperbacks (collected anthologies or series), which you can pick up for £5 to £10 (2nd hand or new).

Here are a few recommendations:

Locke and Key: Welcome to Lovecraft
Goodbye Krool World
East of West
Sanctum
The Watchmen
The Last American

Best set of comics I've ever read!